Christmas in July

[See “Conventional Cuts,” The American Spectator of December, 2006-January, 2007, under “Articles”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The language is too modern and miracles are a little bit cheesy, but the biggest miracle of all is that such a reverent treatment of the life of Christ ever got made into a movie

In The Memory of a Killer, also known as The Alzheimer Case (De Zaak Alzheimer), Erik Van Looy has done a nice job of putting together an engaging, high-concept thriller. But once we’ve finished being caught up in it, we can’t help noticing that the high-concept pretty much goes to waste. It is this. A…

Beautiful People, written and directed by Jasmin Dizdar, is what we might call a Rodney King movie—a relatively harmless, feel-good concoction of a familiar kind which asks, rhetorically, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Of course, neither Jasmin Dizdar nor Rodney King is interested in any answer there may be to their question. Instead,…

A brilliant and heart-breaking Iranian film that is also a superbly plotted detective story

Devil’s Advocate, directed by Taylor Hackford to a script by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy, is like Playing God in being a Hollywood version of the Faust legend. It is a more theologically sophisticated one, if ultimately no more successful. Al Pacino plays the devil under the name of “John Milton”—perhaps because this film comes…